The oddest thing about My Bloody Valentine's new album MBV is listening to it
via digital files says Bernadette McNulty.

The strangest thing about this new album from revered Anglo-Irish indie quartet My Bloody Valentine is not that it has appeared out-of-the-blue after 22 years gestation; nor that it sounds like such a continuation of their previous aesthetic that the band may have actually been cryogenically frozen for the last two decades.

By far the oddest thing right now is listening to it via digital files. Because if any band managed to encapsulate the physical allure of vinyl it was this one. Their 1991 album Loveless was so influential because it was like standing next to a row of turntables, listening to three or four wonky records spinning around at different times and volumes, mixing the often disparate sounds of ghostly west-coast harmonies, squalling garage-rock guitars, droning grooves and sometimes even sinuous basslines. That there emerged a hypnotic wall-of-sound, a terrifying, thrillingly intimate coalescence, made Kevin Shields look like a wizard.

Those same multilayered textures are all here, and if anything there are more finely chiselled planes of fresh variation: there is a discipline as well as wildness behind the distortion. But this is still a vinyl record trapped on a computer hard drive, and as such, is like playing it while undergoing an MRI scan.

If you are a fan - and let’s face it, this is not going to widen their demographic - then have some patience and wait for the postman to bring that vinyl parcel around.